For the SS officer, see Karl Heinz Bühler

Karl Heinz Bühler

Karl Heinz Bühler was a Obersturmbannführer in the Waffen SS during World War II who was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Which was awarded to recognize extreme battlefield bravery or successful military leadership by Nazi Germany during World War II.Karl Heinz Bühler was born on the...

Karl Ludwig Bühler (May 27, 1879, Meckesheim - October 24, 1963, Los Angeles) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 psychologist

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 and Linguist. In psychology he is known for his work in gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a theory of mind and brain of the Berlin School; the operational principle of gestalt psychology is that the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies...

, and he was one of the founders of the Würzburg tradition of Psychology. In linguistics he is known for his Organon model

Organon model

The Organon model, formulated by Karl Bühler, defined the communication functions according to which linguistic communication can be described...

 of communication and his treatment of deixis

Deixis

In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place...

 as a linguistic phenomenon. He was the dissertation advisor of Karl Popper

Karl Popper

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...

. His wife was the well-known psychologist Charlotte Bühler.

Biography

In 1899 Bühler started med-school at the University of Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 1903. He continued working as an assistant, and started taking a second degree in psychology graduating in 1904. In 1906 heworked as an assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg with von Kries, and as an assistant to Oswald Külpe

Oswald Külpe

Oswald Külpe was one of the structural psychologists of the late 19th and early 20th century.-Biography:...

 at the Julius-Maximilians-University in Würzburg.

He completed his Habilitation

Habilitation

Habilitation is the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in several European and Asian countries. Earned after obtaining a research doctorate, such as a PhD, habilitation requires the candidate to write a professorial thesis based on independent...

 thesis at Würzburg in 1907, with the titel "Tatsachen und Probleme zu einer Psychologie der Denkvorgänge" (Facts and problems of a psychology of thought processes). This text became foundational for the Würzburg school in Psychology and sparked heated controversy with Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Wundt

Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology"...

. In 1909 Bühler changed to the University of Bonn

University of Bonn

The University of Bonn is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany. Founded in its present form in 1818, as the linear successor of earlier academic institutions, the University of Bonn is today one of the leading universities in Germany. The University of Bonn offers a large number...

, becoming the assistant to Oswald Külpe.

From 1913 to 1918 Bühler worked as an associate professor in Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

. In World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 he did military service as a doctor. During the war he married Charlotte Malachowski, a student of Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...

. In 1918 he was made a full professor of philosophy and education at the Technical University of Dresden

Dresden

Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....

.

In 1922 he became Professor of Psychology at the University of Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

 and head of the Psychology Department. He participated in the founding of the Psychological Institute of Vienna as part of the city's efforts to reorganize the school system on the basis of new scientific findings about Child psychology. His wife, Charlotte Bühler, followed him and received a professorship in Vienna. Both taught at the University of Vienna until their common emigration.

On 23 March 1938, Bühler was briefly detained by the Nazis, which caused him to flee to London in 1940, then to Oslo. Finally he emigrated to the United States, where he worked from 1940 to 1945 as a professor in Minnesota and from 1945 to 1955 as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

In 1959 Karl Bühler was honored with the Wilhelm-Wundt-Medal of the German Society of Psychology.